Battle of Adrianople (1365)

Ottoman conquest of Adrianople

Date	1361 or 1369
Location	Adrianople (modern Edirne)
Result	Ottoman victory

Belligerents

Byzantine Empire

Ottoman Empire

Adrianople, a major Byzantine city in Thrace, was conquered by the Ottomans sometime in the 1360s, and eventually became the Ottoman capital, until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453.

Following the capture of Gallipoli by the Ottomans in 1354, Turkish expansion in the southern Balkans was rapid. Although they had to halt their advance during the Kidnapping of Şehzade Halil between 1357–59, after Halil's rescue they resumed their advance. Main target of the advance was Adrianople, which was the third most important Byzantine city (after Constantinople and Thessalonica). Whether under Ottoman control or as independent ghazi warrior bands, the Turks seized Demotika (Didymoteicho) in 1360 or 1361 and Philippopolis in 1363. Despite the recovery of Gallipoli for Byzantium by the Savoyard Crusade in 1366, an increasing number of Turcoman warriors crossed over from Anatolia into Europe, gradually acquiring control of the plains of Thrace and pushing to the Rhodope Mountains in the west and the Bulgarian principalities in the north.

The date of Adrianople's fall to the Turks has been disputed among scholars due to the differing accounts in the source material, with the years 1361 to 1362, 1367 and 1371 variously proposed. Following sources dating from long after the events, earlier scholarship generally placed the conquest between 1361 and 1363, in accordance with the report in Ottoman sources that a solar eclipse occurred in the year of Adrianople's fall. Thus later Turkish sources report that Lala Shahin Pasha defeated the Byzantine ruler (tekfur) of the city at a battle in Sazli-Dere southeast of the city, forcing him to secretly flee by boat. The inhabitants, left to their fate, agreed to surrender the city in July 1362 in exchange for a guarantee of freedom to continue to live in the city as before.

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